Some of you may have come across the
story of the drunk who was found by a policeman on his hands and knees beneath
a lamppost at night rummaging on the ground. The policeman asked him what he
was doing. The drunk replied that he was looking for his keys which he had
lost. The policeman asked if he had dropped them by the lamppost. The drunk
replied ‘No, it was further down the street, but there isn’t a
light down there’! I thought of that story when I came to our passage
in Romans this morning. The temptation is to look for answers to questions
the passage is not really asking and looking in all the wrong places, rather
than focusing on the light it sheds on the issue it really wants to deal with.
The middle bit- vv 13-17- can seem rather complicated going down all sorts
of side alleys. What we need to do first of all is to ask: what is the big
issue for Paul?

The big issue is that Paul wishes to draw a comparison
between the first man, Adam, and the ultimate man- Jesus. In verse 14 Paul
talks about Adam (the name simply means ‘man’) being a pattern
or prototype of Christ who ‘was to come’. And it is how Adam is
a prototype of Jesus which is the main concern of the passage.

Paul
begins his argument in verse 12, ’Therefore, just as sin entered the
world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to
all people, because all sinned…’ and you expect him to go on and
finish the sentence and say ‘likewise’ and then talk about Jesus,
but he doesn’t – he breaks off his train of thought to deal with
some anticipated questions which are related to his theme but not central to
it. He then picks up the argument and finishes it in verses 18 and 19 and you
hear the same ideas as in verse 12, ‘Just as one trespass resulted in
condemnation for all people’; ‘For just as through the disobedience
of the one man the many were made sinners.’ So on one side of the
comparison you have one person engaging in one act which has an effect on many
people- which was disastrous- that is Adam; on the other side of the comparison
we have Jesus, ‘so also one righteous act resulted in justification and
life for all people’; ‘so also through the obedience of the one
man the many will be made righteous’- which is wonderful.

So
why is Paul making such a comparison- one man doing one thing which has an
effect on the many and another man doing another thing also having an effect
on the many?

Well, in chapters 1 to 3 Paul has shown that every person
who has ever lived on earth (with one exception) has been in a state of sin;
that is having twisted hearts set on dethroning God and enthroning self. The
result is that whether you are religious or a reprobate, God’s anger
is directed against you. However, because of the action of Jesus things are
different; there is now the possibility of being acquitted by God instead of
being condemned by God by putting our trust in him who died for us and rose
again. But that raises a question: How can ‘one’ person- Jesus-
do something which has an effect on people throughout the world and throughout
history?

Paul answers that question by showing that this is not a
novel idea because it has happened before and accounts for why the world is
in such a mess in the first place. One man did something fatal which led to
the virus of sin coming into the world together with death, which required
another man- Jesus, to not only undo the carnage caused by the first
man, but to make something infinitely better.

We might think of it
like this: Adam acted in one way which took humanity down one road- the road
to ruin. Jesus acted in another way which opens up for humanity another road-
the road to redemption. That is the big issue of the passage.

Let’s
think of the passage as a journey. Verse 12 is our starting point and verses
18-21 our destination but the way there is a little meandering.

First,
let’s look at the ruin.

Paul pinpoints three truths for us
in verse 12. First, sin came into the world through the act of one man. The
word for sin in verse 12 carries the idea of ‘missing the mark’,
it is a tragic falling short of what we were meant to be living under God’s
loving rule, but instead we live in God’s world as if he didn’t
exist, taking his gifts and spurning the Giver. In a profound way we are being
‘sub-human’ when we act like that- living below what we were created
to be. In verse 18 and 19 Paul speaks of sin a little differently. In verse
18 the word he uses is ‘trespass’ –deliberately stepping
over the mark. The sign says ‘Keep off the grass,’ and we decide
to ignore it and do it anyway. Similarly verse 19 speaks of sin as ‘disobedience’.
A clear command is given and is deliberately disobeyed. That is what happened
with Adam by breaking the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge-
and you know what? We have been acting like him ever since.

Second,
death came into the world as the consequence of sin, ‘the day you eat
of the fruit you will die’ promised God. That happened. There was the
death of the relationship with God and a sort of death between the man and
the woman in that they no longer related well together. This was followed by
physical death; a kind of black sacrament which symbolises what sin does- it
destroys.

Thirdly, death spread because all sinned. Just as the AIDS
virus entered the humans system through one person, and the virus and its fatal
progeny spread through human society, likewise Paul pictures the spread of
sin and death with one vital difference- the transmission rate is one hundred
percent. All sin and all die.

But then Paul meanders a bit in his
argument to deal with a couple of other points.

The first is in verse
13 where Paul tells us that sin is bigger than breaking God’s law (rpt).
Before the law was given, he says, there was sin. We know that because the
penalty for sin was in operation- death, even amongst those who didn’t
sin like Adam in breaking an explicit command given by God. As Paul has already
demonstrated in the first two chapters we can sin in ways which don’t
involve knowingly breaking the Ten Commandments, for example: we lie, we cheat,
we steal, we suppress our knowledge of God and violate our consciences. However,
when we are given God’s commands- the law- then what happens then? Well,
Paul tells us in verse 20 that in one sense it makes things worse it ‘increases
the trespass’ by bringing out of us the desire to sin. It is like the
story of the Old Woman who lived in the Shoe with all those children. One day
she said, ‘I am going out shopping, whatever you do, don’t put
any peas up your nose’. When she came back- you’ve guessed it-
every child had a pea up their nose. That is what sin is like when faced with
a command. We enter this world as damaged goods not fit for purpose- falling
short. We are constitutional sinners. We sin because we are sinners by nature
and we sinners because we sin. Our ruin is total.

Someone who had
seen evil close up and looked it in the eye while a prisoner in a Soviet Gulag
was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This is the way he describes his ‘eureka’
moment concerning the nature of sin and the human condition: ‘It was
only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed myself the first
stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating
good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political
parties either, but right through the human heart, and through all human hearts.’
When the Times of London once asked several of Britain’s leading intellectuals
what they thought was the problem with the world, the Christian writer G. K.
Chesterton sent back a postcard response. ‘What is wrong with the world,
‘I am’’. That is what Paul is saying. We collude with sin,
we nurture it and are mastered by it and we are condemned because of it (v16).
What the first man did sent disruptive shock waves throughout creation and
down history and we are his progeny, as we say ‘like father like son’.
We are all either sons of Adam or daughters of Eve and we are a mess.

Then
Paul makes the big contrast- the redemption.

In verse 15 we are told
that the gift (that is the gift of salvation), is not like the trespass, it
is something much, much more. In one sense, says Paul in verse 16, the gift
of God can’t be compared with the results of Adam’s sin, for that
was a wholly negative thing leading to condemnation, but the gift of God’s
grace in the last Adam- Jesus, brings justification- a wholly positive thing.
Now you may think what happened as a result of Adam’s disobedience was
far reaching and cataclysmic, and so it was. But don’t underestimate
by way of contrast what Christ has achieved by his obedience in going to the
cross. Think of it like this. In recent years we have seen the devastating
effect of forest fires in California, some caused by individuals who struck
a match deliberately to make a fire so that it spread, resulting in acres of
land being scorched, houses and whole towns burnt to the ground. There is no
minimising the effect of one person’s action there. But compare that
to the astonishing and brave work of the firefighters in putting out the blaze
and the saving of lives by the emergency services and then the reconstruction
of the towns from the rubble to produce brand new dwellings far better than
those which had been lost in some cases. Sure the act of one person causing
devastation and misery was great but the act of rescue and rebuilding is even
greater. Do you see? That is the idea here. Or to change the imagery: which
is the greater thing, to take the life of a person in murder or to bring back
to life someone who has been murdered? The answer is obvious- the miracle of
raising the dead. Well, Jesus is in the business of bringing people back to
life, fighting the fire of sin and rebuilding not just a burnt out town but
a ruined universe- and he is one man!

And the shear superabundance
of God’s grace in Jesus Christ is brought out even further in the third
point- the reign.

Look at verse 17, ‘For if, by the trespass
of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those
who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness
reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.’ and then verse 21,
‘just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness
to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

You know,
some people might ask, how can it be fair that the decision made by one person
should have bad effects on others who were not involved in making that decision?
Well, let’s think a little of the Roman society the early Christian were
living in. Suppose a man carried out some criminal act or got himself into
debt. One consequence could be that he sells himself into slavery. That is
the price he pays for what he has done. Of course, not only is he sold into
slavery, but the rest of his family with him, and if they have any children
and grandchildren- they will be slaves too, that is the way it goes. Many of
us are caught up in the fall-out of acts carried out by people who are in a
position of responsibility for us. When Adam sinned, he sold himself and his
family into a kind of slavery- slavery to sin and death. His wilful disobedience
took him and his human family into a dark kingdom in which death reigned. What
was promised by the serpent was freedom, what resulted was slavery. But with
Jesus something remarkable has happened. Verse 17 says that those who have
received God’s gift of righteousness in Christ are not simply set free,
they become kings- they ‘reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.’
Adam was meant to reign over the world under God. His rebellion resulted in
being reigned over by death. Jesus reigns over the world as its King, and we
are kings with him, a theme taken up in the book of Revelation. Through his
new people, God starts to restore things, first by proclaiming the Gospel so
that people are set free from slavery to death and are given eternal life-v21,
but also in that they start to bring to bear God’s reign by applying
his Word to the whole of life empowered by the Holy Spirit. This is why in
the 18th and 19th centuries society in England became changed for the better
by the work of Christian social Reformers. Just listen to what Professor Halevy
writes of the abolition of slavery ‘…to understand the delight
with which the emancipation of the Negroes was greeted, the rejoicings which
took place on a large scale throughout the entire country…we must remember
that the abolitionist campaign had been first and foremost a Christian movement.’
Or think of improvements in popular education, this is what we read in one
of the early editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that this was ‘A
striking tribute to the sterling qualities of self-help and religious earnestness
which were so characteristic of the Early Victorian period.’ Improvements
in worker’s rights and conditions can also be traced back to the influence
of Christianity. Here is the late Jack Lawson, MP in his book ‘A Man’s
Life’ ‘The first fighters and speakers for unions and improved
conditions were Methodist preachers. That is beyond argument. And the Gospel
expressed in social terms has been more of a driving power in northern mining
circles than all the economic teaching put together.’ It wasn’t
the teaching of Karl Marx which led to social transformation but Jesus Christ.
I know that it is popular to put down anything which appears to be based on
moral principle and ‘Victorian’, but while they were far from perfect
the social transformation for the good even here in Hull, in reducing prostitution,
the effects of alcohol, improvement in education can be traced back mainly
to the work of Evangelicals- both Anglican and Methodist. This is the ‘gift
of righteousness reigning in life.’

General George Patton head
of the American Third Army was one of the most outstanding generals of the
Second World War. At points he seemed positively certifiable, but he was a
military genius. Whether it actually happened in life or not I am not sure,
but there is a scene in the film Patton where he says to one of his aids something
to this effect, ‘The way this war should be settled is for me to face
General Rommel out in the battlefield- me in my tank and Rommel in his. Whoever
wins that battle decides the outcome of the war.’ Well, we have one who
has decided the outcome of the great spiritual war which engulfs our planet
and his name is Jesus.

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